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kmh19

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Pizza. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of digital innovation or technology. Yet, when considering the winners and losers of the economy’s digital transformation, there can be no denying that pizza has a place at the [...]

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Super interesting post! Building off some cases that we discussed in the RC curriculum (which suggested that the market may only have room for top-tier major newspapers and smaller, local players), I found this to be a really unique perspective on the industry.

One component that will be central to the continued success of of Arc will be how they approach the value capture component of any platform business. As you’ve articulated, existing publications have fallen on dire straits and Google / Facebook have captured essentially all of the the online ad industry. Accordingly, if these publications are to survive and generate more localized content, Arc may have to be more “philanthropic” in its value capture approach.

Great post! This is an interesting topic to consider from the lens of disruptive innovation (i.e., BSSE). I would hypothesize the main factors that consumers consider would be price, convenience, and quality of the workout. With this in mind, it seems that ClassPass would be a tailwind for boutique gyms because it improves the relative price and quality of these products versus big box gyms. Because of this, boutiques ate into much of the market share once dominated by big box retailers. The one metric that it doesn’t improve for consumers is convenience. This likely explains the rise of the at-home workout offerings you’ve described.

Looking forward, one question I would have is what the market outlook is for a super-high-end player like Equinox. Will they be able to provide so much value / quality for their customers that they can sustain their performance, while the at-home players get better and better?

Thanks for the post! I found the SNKRs portion of your write-up to be particularly interesting – in particular, the fact that the company aims to achieve 300M users by 2023.

From my understanding, the SNKRS app is attempting to recreate the sneakerhead experience, in terms of exclusivity and achievement (in terms of getting access to an in-demand pair of shoes). Yet, at the same time, the app tries to provide a level of “meritocracy” in terms of any particular user might have a chance to buy an exclusive drop. An interesting wrinkle to this dynamic is that, as the user base grows, both the exclusivity and the achievement provided by the app decrease (i.e., more people will be buying formerly “exclusive” drops and it will be harder to achieve access to the drops you want, due to more competition).

While this is an impediment to the growth of this platform, it might actually be beneficial to Nike in the long-run, as it will not anger their existing (and much larger) channel partners, which I believe will continue to be very important to Nike in the future.

Great post! As you mentioned, similarities can be drawn between Rappi and Amazon. While you’ve clearly demonstrated some of the differences, could there be any potential that Rappi follows Amazon’s lead in building Rappi-branded products for delivery (i.e., in a similar fashion to Amazon Basics brand). A decision to sell its own branded products would certainly affect the value being created for its to the CPGs, grocery stores, and restaurants that it is currently serving.

Great post! One component of value creation that you allude to in your final point is the positive externality of education at a societal level. Perhaps that suggests that platforms that benefit society in such a fashion should actually be subsidized by governmental agencies. If that were to happen, these platforms would likely have to work to articulate and quantify the value that they bring to a society.

Great post! When evaluating platforms like theSkimm, it seems that their models of value creation and value capture are particularly difficult to reconcile. Since theSkimm has relied on integrating advertising into its content, I fear that increases in the rate of advertising will lead to its users perceiving the value of the content to be inferior (even if that is not truly the case). In that case, theSkimm would do well to continue focusing on increasing user stickiness with products like Skimm Ahead, which would discourage users from finding a similar news aggregation service with less advertising.